Humility before Honor
by Sasha M. Artzen
Summary: During Truth. When it looks bad, Mulder get a little help from a friend


Title: Humility before Honor.  
  
Date: 6/13/02  
  
Writer: Shasha Shuka.  
  
Summary: When it looks dark for Mulder he gets help from an old friend.  
  
Spoilers: The Truth.  
  
Disclaimer: Yep, you know it I don't own anything and never will…sigh. I guess I'll just go play with my cards. Any similarities to stories written are a fluke and just plane freaky.  
  
The DVD Commentary: What's there to say, I was bored it was there. Most was written in a delirious state of a fever…take care. Also due to the fact I couldn't get a good time frame on some of the Alex Krycek activities, well most of them, please bare with me. Help is welcomed! The ending Krycek Line is originally from James Ellory's L.A. Confidential. If you read this backwards you will hear Paul is dead and probably "Girls just want to have fun." By Cindy Lauper…arg!!!  
  
Suggested Music: Moby man Moby he has a new album!!  
  
Special Thanks: The people who told I should A) write more or B) Get out of the house more, the writers of the first amendment. Peace yo! The nice people who invented mono so horny teenagers will learn their lessons. Very Special thanks to Monica, she knows who she is, who urged me to write this beast so its her fault.  
  
Extra-Special thanks: Bret Easton Ellis, whose writing style I try to copy, the Paper Mill workers of America, Jimmy Hoffa.  
  
Feed back: Please I need some and possibly some juice.  
  
"Before honor there is humility."  
  
~Proverbs 15:33  
  
Or for Gamers the Knight Errant Card in Magic the Gathering  
  
It looked bleak for Mulder, he knew it, Skinner knew it and so did Scully. He was the only who was accepting it as he fate. Death. After all he failed at what his task to expose the truth. He'd saved Marita from that fate and watched her walk out. Skinner was about to call his next witness when she pranced back in with a nervous look and approached Skinner. Mulder could see it in her eyes this was big. She bent over and whispered something in Skinner's Ear. When he had finished she shot her a stunned look.  
  
"Is there something you'd like to share with the court Assistant Director Skinner?" asked Kersh.  
  
Skinner ignored Kersh's comment. "What do you mean he wants to testify? He's supposed to be dead!"  
  
"Well how do you think I got her?"  
  
"But the dead can not testify."  
  
"He could help you case."  
  
Skinner relented and then stood as Marita pranced back out of the courtroom.  
  
"The Defense would like to call its next witness. Benjamin D. Artzen."  
  
The door opened revealing a man in his mid to late thirties. Mulder's mouth dropped as he walked in. No, this wasn't right! The dead weren't supposed to rise and come to testify on his behalf. The man walked in. He looked clean, not like whom he was: brown blazer with matching pants, and a navy blue polo shirt probably with a little polo man or a crocodile on it somewhere. He looked overall tired maybe a little sick but those eyes were still sharp and almost primal. He took the stand; it was amusing to watch a man like him to swear on the Bible and the five-minute argument with the man holding the bible to raise his left arm, which he couldn't. It ended when he tapped his arm showing the man that it was plastic and going nowhere, dumb ass. Skinner approached the bench.  
  
"State your full name for the jury and occupation."  
  
"Benjamin Dimitri Artzen and I sell used cars in Branson, Mo."  
  
"Can you tell us what your original name and former occupation?"  
  
"Alexander Dimtrivic Krycek. I use to work for the supposed alien conspiracy until my retirement over a year ago."  
  
"Objection," said the prosecution. "If this is going to be more fairly tales about little green men…"  
  
"They prefer to be called gray." Krycek said. Nice to see he hadn't lost that since of humor. "They get very upset when they get called green. Of course they call all of us pinks."  
  
"Sustained. Please stay on task."  
  
"Mr. Krycek," well, well being called Mister what a change. "What is your relationship to Agent Mulder?"  
  
" I was originally assigned to Mulder by employers, a shadowy group calling themselves the Syndicate, to keep tabs on Agent Mulder after the closing of the X-Files in 1994. To destroy any evidence the man found and to root out his new informant."  
  
"For what purpose?"  
  
"To conceal what truth that Agent Mulder could uncover and to make sure that the ties between Agents Scully and Mulder severed and the two were kept separate from each other. When that posed a problem Agent Scully was abducted mostly as a ploy to keep them separate."  
  
"You left the FBI upon the apprehension of one Duane Berry."  
  
"It's not leaving when you were never a member, but yes I did leave after Berry's unfortunate death." This caused Mulder to flash back to that night all the emotions the actions and causing him to hate Krycek even more.  
  
"Unfortunate?!?" Yelled Mulder. Jesus, this is going to be harder than thought our hero. "You killed him!"  
  
"I didn't kill him…you can't link it. May I continue?" He said calmly to Mulder shooting him a dark glance. Mulder nodded. " Thank you. I had completed my mission at that time and was not needed in there any more."  
  
"Such as. "  
  
"Assassination and other misfortunes."  
  
"What does stating the witness past crimes due apart from destroy the credibility of the witness." Prosecution… again.  
  
"It incriminates myself and the men and women who were apart of the conspiracy." Said our hero. "Thus creating a credibility for Agent Mulder's actions."  
  
"I'm going to allow it." Krycek smiled. He still had Kersh by the balls. That was a wonderful feeling. "Proceed."  
  
"Mr. Krycek, you continued to work with the Syndicate until a specific point in time due the failing of an assignment."  
  
"In 1995, Agent Mulder had uncovered some information on hybridization projects done by the U.S. government to work on a vaccine to combat the black oil. We contaminated Mulder's Water with an LSD derivative to cause Mulder to be Lucid. We were not to kill him. That would cause his quote "one man's beliefs to become another's crusade". We just didn't want him to speak. We were also ordered to contain any possible leaks."  
  
"Like."  
  
"A computer hacker nicked named the Thinker I believe who had downloaded the legendary MJ Files that stated various aspects of the project. Which was delivered to Agent Mulder in a meeting then turned over to Assistant Director Skinner." He gave off a smug grin. "Which was later recovered by myself and co-patriots. When a team that was running surveillance of Mulder had told us he had gone to see the man he believed to be his father we saw an impending threat to the cause, which were to pinpoint and neutralize it. Which we did." Krycek thought back to the assassination on Bill Mulder and how it been easy to kill an old man. That's when the nightmare started.  
  
"What form were the MJ Files in?"  
  
"Something called a digital tape." He chuckled. "It made me lonely for good ole' days for James Bond and Micro-Film."  
  
"Sir, I don't understand where this is going."  
  
"You don't understand because you are not listening. I'm getting to the point." Said Krycek being truly annoyed by the opposing council. God you'd think a Kangaroo court would have smart people. "Don't blink, your sharp intellect might miss it. After the assassination of Bill Mulder the order came in that all possible leaks were to be sealed. Our first order of business was the one person Agent Mulder trusted more than his own Mother: Agent Scully. I was sent in a two-man team with a Louis Cardinal to assassinate Agent Scully. I believe we were selected to commit such act due to my familiarity with the target and Cardinal's vicious but brilliant skills."  
  
"But why not send you Krycek." Ah, So long "Mr. Krycek." Back to beat the shit out of Skinner out in a stair well and steal his milk money and the Digital tape Krycek. "You had familiarity on the subject."  
  
"Because, I refuse to kill women and children. There's no point in that."  
  
"How noble." Mulder muttered. Of course he always muttered.  
  
"One more outburst like that Agent Mulder." Kersh. "And I will have you gagged for the rest of this trial. Please proceed and no comments from the peanut gallery."  
  
"Cardinal and I broke into Agent Scully's Apartment where we mistakenly killed her older sister Melissa."  
  
"Mistakenly. You just said you were skilled."  
  
"Louis was always a one who couldn't wait for visual confirmation on a target and had a "let's go" mentality. Its what eventually got him killed. We saw a red head is Agent Scully's Apartment and I said. "Louis I think its her but I don't know until I see her…" He fired a shot at Ms. Scully's sister thus fatally wounding her. When word of our mistake was received at the home office we our contracts were terminated."  
  
"Define Terminated for the people."  
  
"We were to be in any since of the word dead. A fate narrowly escaped by my associate and myself and we paid for it. You know you work for a government agency you'd expect them to not try to kill you in a cowards manner."  
  
"Paid for it?"  
  
"For Louis it resulted in the Gangland murder of his mother, baby sister, and his mother's boyfriend in South Central, L.A. all of which were recent immigrants from Honduras. For myself it resulted in the death of my young pregnant wife, my three-year-old daughter, and my unborn son as well as the flight of my relatives back to Russia." He said quietly calmly knowing; somehow, Marita was listening to his testimony. "Needless to say this drove us to our next line of business. I had recovered the tape and after the funerals of our family we went into business together sell what we had taken from the car before it exploded and what we knew and sold it to foreign governments who were working on the same thing. You'd be amazed on how much little things go. It's on one of these trips to Hong Kong in which I met up with Agent Mulder…again."  
  
"What was Agent Mulder doing in Hong Kong?"  
  
"I don't know I'm not his keeper. That was your job." Skinner grumbled. Krycek was getting bored with this questioning and he was only up to season three. "I was there because I met an investor, French, who would like to buy the Tape. They had quadrants for a sunken Submarine from the World War II era. The sub was really an alien ship. The deal went south when Mulder, the French Agents and my Hong Kong contact, which the French shot, arrived. This meant that the deal had gone to hell and fast. Meaning I had to make an artful escape. Only to be accosted by Agent Mulder in the Airport as I was going back to Russia, where I had established myself as a chief player in the work in developing the vaccine. Anyway I could hurt the old man. Understand what we all went through for him."  
  
"The Old man you are referring to your employer?"  
  
"…Sure…"  
  
"Could you please tell the court who that was."  
  
"What? He never had a name. The Devil doesn't have a name. We just called him the black lung son of a bitch mostly; I use to call him various things in different languages. But I digress… The last thing I remember was the bathroom." He laughed. "I got attacked by a woman." He cracked up again. "In all of five minutes I was attacked by a woman and it goes black."  
  
"Black?"  
  
"I can't remember anything after that happened after except the missile silo, otherwise there is nothing."  
  
"What happened when you regain cognitive state?"  
  
"Like I said, I was in a missile silo in North Dakota and was for a period of time. Weren't you listening?"  
  
"Days? Hours? Months?"  
  
"I don't know. You lose track of time when you're in that kind of state. It feels like a few days but it might be just like a few hours or three months." His voiced trailed off. "I was liberated by a group of militant separatists based in North Dakota once I returned to my full health I split my time between Terma and back home. When a bombing raid was stopped at the careful hands of the FBI's finest. Which leads to some odd tips upon tips and a field trip to Tunguska, which for the record I wasn't suppose to be there and anything that happen would have been the fault of Agent Mulder."  
  
"Fault."  
  
"You know Cossacks, mutilation, you name it."  
  
"Your serious."  
  
"If Mulder had been a good little drone none of it would have happened or quiet frankly none of this. I'd still be powerful and Russian and he'd probably crushed to death in a mining accident."  
  
"You'd like that wouldn't you Krycek."  
  
"Well, yes but its not about what I like."  
  
"Will you two mind keeping any arguments until after Mr. Krycek's testimony." Yelled Kersh. "You two sound like a couple of bickering ex- lovers."  
  
It was at that moment simultaneously both Krycek and Mulder remember that shared kiss. Of friendship or was of it more. What could have been a night of homoerotic passion between the foes? They then looked at each other across the courtroom, eyes meeting and looking deep at each other and just shuddered. Mulder kept telling himself that it was Krycek and Krycek kept reminding himself about the Speedo. Krycek then continued on his dry monologue of what happened in Russia, about the mining and the experiments and so on and so forth. Mulder's mind wondered lonely as a cloud, he thought about William and where he was, the people who had died, people who were suppose to be dead but clearly sitting as large as life telling the secrets of the world to people who didn't care or already knew and it doesn't matter. Why was Krycek doing this he was going to be killed for what he was doing of course he was already dead so it didn't matter but they would kill him for real this time. Mulder then felt a hand on his shoulder…again. He turned to meet the gaze of a bearded man in a long Jedi Robe. It was Obi Wan Kenobi (Sir Alec Guinness not Ewan Macgregor).  
  
"Use the force." And then faded away thus leaving Mulder confused and on the slow ride down the path to mental insanity.  
  
"It was upon this direction that I returned to the United States with recent information on the stepping up of invasion and the counter measures by the rebels, I was told that it was in my best interest by an associate of mine to do so. In fact the Russians had developed a vaccine and I felt with the information should be shared with the rest of the world…for a price. It was however at this point that I was met with a double cross of the kind soul of my counterpart who had kidnapped my bargaining chip which lead me back to the hands of my former employers." He shut his eyes for a moment. He could just feel the details on his hands his lips. Marita, the mistake he'd made coming back and leaving her for dead. As if he had any choice in those matters. It's why he turned over the vaccine. He'd never admit it but he was semi-in love with her. After all it's why they agreed to get married…that was the mistake. "Upon my return I came to the conclusion that my end was near which caused me to look for an alternate way out of the business. I then free lanced for a while which landed me in a not so nice place called prison. It was at that point that I felt I needed to get out fast. But people like myself don't just retire. We have to find…more creative ways out. This leads to some extra planning on my part, after all I have leave a body unlike some of my counter parts. I found that from the files I stole from the X-files that there was a gentlemen who bared a striking resemblance to myself who had contact with an alien race who called themselves the on this planet the Brethren. They were refugees from a planet long destroyed by the colonists. They just wanted to be Amish. I thus abducted the gentlemen and convinced him that he was I. You'd be amazed how useful psychotropic drugs can be in convincing people there something they aren't. And slipped into a quiet retirement until some ruined that nice peace when they just HAD to get arrested for killing some one."  
  
"No further questions." Said Skinner as he sat down after what seemed like six pages of monologue from Alex Krycek. This caused the prosecution to now cross-examine our hero, which caused him become amused.  
  
"So Mr. Krycek, you've came here today can basically confessed to almost seven years of murder espionage and human rights abuses."  
  
"Your point?"  
  
"Do you even expect that you'll walk out of here with out being arrested?"  
  
"Of course I do, because I know ever dark sin committed by this assembled party…except for the alien. Even yourself sir."  
  
"Really? What then would you know about myself?"  
  
Krycek motioned for him to approach him with a sly grin, which was done. Krycek then leaned over and whispered into his ear. The prosecutor went pale and eyes went large. Krycek leaned back. "And he's your son you sick fuck."  
  
"No-no further questions."  
  
*****INSERT JUMP CUT HERE******  
  
He walked out smoothly can calmly catching up with Marita who waited with the stroller. He smiled at her and they walked away.  
  
"You know you gave them enough rope to hang you Alex."  
  
"They have to find me first."  
  
"Not this bullshit again. Alex we can't keep running."  
  
"We won't have to. Once we get to White Horse it will be over. How's the Baby doing?"  
  
"He's been quiet. Scully came by us, she didn't even recognize him."  
  
"That's because you dressed him up to look like a Girl."  
  
"Well she said I had a very pretty daughter. How are you feeling?"  
  
"Its not a bad day but we just need to get out of here because I only can hold the FBI by the balls for so long."  
  
"Language!"  
  
"I don't think Nikita understands."  
  
"His name is William, where in the hell did you get the idea we were calling him Nikita."  
  
"This from the woman who wanted to call him Luke."  
  
"It's a biblical name, Alexie."  
  
He rolled his eyes; he'd always hated being called that. He knew Marita knew that. It reminded him of his mother. He then looped his arm around hers. As they walked out it reminded him of a book that he read along time ago.  
  
"Some men get the world. Others get Ex-Hookers and trip to Arizona."  
  
"I'm not an ex-hooker."  
  
"I didn't say you were."  
  
Fin. 


End file.
